Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's worth recounting some history in regard to border policy, because I seem to remember it was a former Labor immigration minister that first put children in detention—a Labor minister by the name of Gerry Hand. That's something that today's Labor Party don't like to talk about. Of course, they completely forgot that in 2008 and 2009, under former prime minister Rudd. He engaged in a reckless policy that saw over a thousand people drown at sea.

That is something that the coalition has got a very proud record on. I will pick up Senator McKim, because, under former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser, we actually accepted a large number of refugees from Vietnam, for example. We have always participated in a very healthy refugee intake of almost 20,000 people a year, and I am led to believe that the former foreign minister Julie Bishop actually increased the number of refugees that were coming into Australia under the previous coalition government. So I don't think it's fair to accuse the Liberal Party of dog whistling on this at all.

I myself find it very offensive. I have spent seven years overseas and have travelled through many countries, so I get a little bit annoyed when, if you talk about trying to defend your own country's borders, somehow that makes you racist. That is not the case.

We know that strong borders save lives. You've only got to look at the large number of people who have drowned in the Mediterranean, and at the number of Africans who have tried to emigrate from Africa to Europe, to see the enormous political and social consequences of having an unregulated immigration rate.

At this stage, it hasn't yet blown out of control with Labor, but we do know that they cannot be trusted on the borders. They cannot be trusted to keep Australia safe when it comes to these issues. They were slow off the mark last year when it came to former criminals who were in detention, and they were released. The immigration minister had plenty of warning about this, but they didn't act. They were too busy focusing on the Voice and identity politics there, trying to divide Australia by race. Of course, we have always promoted the idea that there is one race, the human race, and that we should judge the individual, not the identity. That is actually what true liberalism is, if people stop to appreciate that. A true liberal democracy actually protects the individual and the family. That is what the Liberal Party should always strive for, regardless of race or identity. It's not us who play the identity politics and try and pit straight against gay, black against white, race against race. That sort of stuff I find abhorrent. The identity politics that is played by the Labor Party really needs to be called out.

There is another issue here, and it's the high immigration rate. When you've got a high immigration rate, you get large degrees of homelessness, and we're seeing that throughout Australia now. We are seeing tent cities popping up everywhere. That's endangering the lives of the homeless people who don't have a roof over their head and cannot lock their doors at night. That makes it very dangerous just to survive. Labor need to be called out about this. This isn't just about border protection. This is about dealing with a standard of living that guarantees that every Australian can have a roof over their head and walls around them every night, and they can lock their doors. Labor, for some unexplained reason, have never actually been held to account as to why they decided to have so many people immigrate to Australia straight after the COVID pandemic, when so many people were trying to recover and we clearly didn't have our industries back up and running to deal with a high immigration rate. Labor just did the massive immigration. Maybe they felt like they couldn't bluff Australians, so they needed to get immigrants in as quickly as they could and get them to sign up on the electoral roll so they could get their vote, and fool them, as they often do with immigrants in the first few years—and then, once the immigrants have stayed for a while, they quickly realise that Labor aren't the people that they pretend to be.

So I support this motion today. It is a fact that the Labor Albanese government isn't keeping Australians safe.